The Dinner

Herman Koch

awardShortlisted, Specsavers National Book Awards, International Author of the Year, United Kingdom, 2012

awardLonglisted, PEN Translation Prize, United States, 2014

Translated by Sam Garrett

Paul Lohman and his brother Serge and their wives are going to dinner. Paul knows the evening will not be fun. The restaurant will be overpriced and pretentious, and almost everything the charismatic Serge does will infuriate him.

But tonight’s get-together will be worse than usual because there is something the two couples have to discuss.

When the small talk is over, the conversation will turn to their teenage sons. And the terrible thing they have done. And how far the four of them will go to save their children from the consequences of their actions.

Herman Koch was born in 1953. He is a successful actor, screenwriter and columnist in the Netherlands, and has written a number of satirical novels, including The Dinner (2011) which became an international bestseller. The Dinner was adapted for stage and screen in the Netherlands and an English language film adaptation to be directed by Cate...

‘Funny, provocative and exceedingly dark, this is a brilliantly addictive novel that wraps its hands around your throat on page one and doesn’t let go.’

S.J. Watson

‘What a tremendous book. I loved every single gripping and strange thing about it.’

M.J. Hyland

‘A heartstopping thriller, in which no one is innocent. Koch is brilliant at not letting the reader off the hook.’

Niccolò Ammaniti

‘Are family values good? The Dinner will have you wondering. By the end, when all has become truly chilling, you’ll have to rethink everything, including who you are and what you believe. This is a book you won’t forget.’

David Vann

‘Herman Koch’s The Dinner is a riveting, compelling and a deliciously uncomfortable read. Like all great satire it is both lacerating and so very funny. The Dinner got under my skin and punctured all my safe liberal smugness and pieties. Intelligent and complex, this novel is both a punch to the guts and also a tonic. It clears the air. A wonderful book.’

Christos Tsiolkas

‘In this exploration of how two families deal with an explosive event, The Dinner is reminiscent of Christos Tsiolkas’s blockbuster The Slap.’

Stephen Romei, Australian

‘What a wonderfully awkward, slow-burning, page-turning novel it turned out to be.’

Melbourne Weekly

‘As much as The Dinner is a suspenseful story about teenage cousins Michel and Rick, it is equally the rich portrayal of the characters and their individual views that pin the reader to the page.’

Courier Mail

‘Koch’s uncomfortable tale is a wonderful thriller, where the reader’s sympathies are forced to switch again and again, and where you race to a final outcome that is anything but what you might expect. Blackly funny, full of sharp edges and hot issues, and compulsively readable. Verdict: feast on this.’

Herald Sun

‘The Dinner is a masterful, disturbing piece of theatre.’

Age / SMH

‘Little wonder this literary degustation is an international best-seller….a cult movie in the making.’

Australian Women's Weekly

‘Terrific, fascinating writing.’

Otago Daily Times

‘You’ll need a cast-iron stomach to cope with the horrific details, but this meditation on middle-class dilemmas makes compulsive reading.’

North & South

‘Sharpen the knives and batten down the tableware!…Herman Koch’s The Dinner is a biting, blackly funny story of the lengths to which parents will go to protect their offspring.'

Vogue

‘Koch’s structure is superb and his story unfolds like a finely crafted piece of theatre.'

Weekly Review

‘A tightly written thriller which skilfully plays and changes perceptions of the characters with every paragraph, this will leave you feeling shocked and appalled, but full of admiration for the mastery of Koch’s storytelling.'

Sunday Herald Sun

‘I’m confidently predicting that The Dinner will become this summer’s literary talk of the town.’

Evening Standard

‘Proves how powerful fiction can be in illuminating the modern world…The best beach read of the season.'

Economist

‘Shivers kept shooting up my backbone as I became engrossed in Koch’s darkly disturbing tale of family life…As the dinner disintegrates into mayhem, we discover just how far the middle classes will go to protect their monstrous offspring.'

Daily Mail (UK)

‘Rather like The Slap it is set to become a contentious must-read. It may thrill, chill or cheat, but it is undeniably riveting.'

Independent

‘Wrenchingly funny and bleak…the darker the whole thing gets, the more your sides will be splitting. The result is a hugely accomplished and surprisingly subtle novel.'

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Extract fromThe Dinner

As the restaurant is only a few streets from our house, we walked. That led us past the bar where I hadn’t wanted to meet Serge. I had wrapped my arm around my wife’s waist, her hand was somewhere under my coat. Shining on the façade of the bar was the warm, red-and-white neon sign advertising the brand of beer they served inside. “We’re too early,” I said. “Or more precisely, if we go now, we’re going to be right on time.”

My wife – I should stop saying that. She’s called Claire. Her parents had named her Marie Claire, but later Claire didn’t like having exactly the same name as a magazine. Sometimes I call her Marie to tease her. But I hardly ever call her my wife – now and then when speaking officially, in sentences like “My wife can’t come to the telephone at the moment,” or “My wife really was sure that she had booked a room with a sea view.”

On evenings like this Claire and I cherish the moments in which we are alone together. They make us feel as if nothing is fixed, as if even the dinner appointment is a mistake and we’re just out with the two of us. If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: happiness is sufficient to itself, it doesn’t need any witnesses. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” according to the first sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The only thing I feel compelled to add is that the unhappy families – and within those families, the unhappy couples most of all – can never manage alone. The more witnesses, the better. Unhappiness is always in search of company.